The Polls Aren’t Skewed: Trump Really Is Losing Badly

[Rob L 3,811]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-arent-skewed-trump-really-is-losing-badly/

Weve reached that stage of the campaign. The back-to-school commercials are on the air, and the unskewing of polls has begun the quadrennial exercise in which partisans simply adjust the polls to get results more to their liking, usually with a thin sheen of math-y words to make it all sound like rigorous analysis instead of magical thinking.

If any of this sounds familiar and if I sound a little exasperated its probably because we went through this four years ago. Remember UnSkewedPolls.com? (The website is defunct, but you can view an archived picture of it here.) The main contention of that site and others like it was that the polls had too many Democratic respondents in their samples. Dean Chambers, who ran the site, regularly wrote that the polls were vastly undercounting independents and should have used a higher proportion of Republicans in their samples. But in the end, the polls underestimated President Obamas margin.

More Politics

Now the unskewers are back, again insisting that pollsters are using more Democrats than they should, and that the percentage of Democrats and Republicans should be equal, or that there should be more Republicans. They point to surveys like the recent one from ABC News and The Washington Post, in which 33 percent of registered voters identified as Democrats compared to 27 percent as Republicans. That poll found Hillary Clinton ahead by 8 percentage points.

But lets say this plainly: The polls are not skewed. They werent in 2012, and they arent now.

The basic premise of the unskewers is wrong. Most pollsters dont weight their results by party self-identification, which polls get by asking a question like generally speaking, do you usually think of yourself as a. Party identification is an attitude, not a demographic. There isnt some national number from the government that tells us how many Democrats and Republicans there are in the country. Some states collect party registration data, but many states do not. Moreover, party registration is not the same thing as party identification. In a state like Kentucky, for example, there are a lot more registered Democrats than registered Republicans, but more voters identified as Republican in the 2014 election exit polls.

[Teddy B 17,252]